


i love you but it hurts to speak out loud

by theons



Category: Amazingphil - Fandom, Danisnotonfire - Fandom, Phan, Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2009!Au, Fake Dating, Fake Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:08:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7278412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theons/pseuds/theons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan and Phil finally meet in person, and realise that they really don’t get along in person. But they want to keep Phil’s fans happy and they’re both clinging onto hope that they can sort things out between them, so they begin a fake relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from 2012 by Katherine & Eden!
> 
> Rating is mature because of future updates I have planned.
> 
> So this is like the prologue of a fic I'm currently working on!
> 
> I basically posted this as a background thing rather than incorporating this stuff into the fic later because I knew if I posted something I'd definitely keep writing and wouldn't just scrap it.

Dan thought he might just be in love with Phil.

It started out as a crush, when he would come home after a long day at school, and the video in his subscription box that he’d been looking forward to watching the most was Phil’s.

It was still a crush when Dan began commenting on every video, telling Phil how cool and creative he was.

It was still a crush, albeit a large one, when he began to reply to all of Phil’s Tweets and DailyBooth’s, too.

It turned into full on infatuation when Phil began to reply. Slowly at first, a reply here and there, but then more regularly when he began to recognise Dan’s username.

It turned into love when Dan clicked ‘answer’ on Skype and Phil’s face filled his computer screen and his voice, melodic and sweet and lovely even though the poor internet connection as he greeted Dan.

Dan had fallen head over heels.

They got along better than Dan had ever got along with anyone, ever. It wasn’t just that they had the same music taste (Muse) or a common interest in video games (Pokémon) or that they both enjoyed eating the same foods (pizza) and watching the same films (Kill Bill). It was that they both viewed the world in the same way, morally and ethically, and they both liked to have deep conversations at 3 in the morning, phones clutched to ears and duvets pulled over heads. It was the way they both came out with the worst puns and the cheesiest jokes and found them so funny they’d laugh for hours.

So, it made sense to meet up. They’d been talking for months, day in day out. Neither could go a day without talking to the other, without something funny occurring that they just had to share, or without needing to ask advice on something, or share something good that had happened to them, or simply just check that the other was doing okay.

They were best friends, for sure, and something more perhaps. They’d been messaging back and forth on Twitter and DailyBooth, flirting and joking around, and Phil’s fans thought it was adorable, and so when they all starting asking the two of them to do a collab together, it seemed like the perfect excuse to meet. Dan had just started his channel, and a collab with Phil would do him wonders, just like a collab with Dan would excite his fans. It worked out for the both of them, YouTube wise, and personally… it was what they’d both been wanting to happen for months.

Dan spent a month fighting with his mum, begging and bargaining to get himself permission to go to Manchester to see Phil. He sat her down and showed her his videos, then let her talk to him for a little bit on Skype, all to ease her nerves, but she still didn’t want him travelling across the country to stay with someone he’d met online. But he wore her down, as did Phil — his mum loved Phil, how could she not? — before long Dan was booking his train tickets from Wokingham to Reading, then from Reading to Manchester.

On the day, he bought a coffee from inside crappy little Wokingham station, before emerging to the platform to wait for the train. It took fifteen minutes to get into Reading, but by the time he was there it felt like an hour. It was then another fifteen minutes until his next train to Manchester arrived. He sat in his seat, ramrod straight, tense and nervous suddenly because he was meeting Phil and he couldn’t stop worrying. What if, in person, Phil would realise just how young Dan was, realise just how clingy and needy he was, and just decide he never wanted to see him again.

Dan knew, logically, that none of that would happen. He and Phil were best friends, in love even, and he couldn’t wait to see him. But at the same time, wouldn’t it be easier to leave things as they were? Things were great now, what if meeting in person would just ruin everything?

As it turned out, meeting in person did exactly that.

Dan hugged Phil at the train station, running over to him as soon as he spotted him. Phil hugged him back, but it didn’t feel like how Dan had imagined it to: warm and lovely and like coming home. It felt a little awkward, and so Dan stepped back too soon, pushing his hands into his coat pockets, cheeks turning red with embarrassment: he couldn’t even hug Phil right.

It went on like this. They stumbled over coffee orders when Phil tried to show Dan around Manchester, and Dan made fun of a ridiculous looking shop that contained nothing but knitting needles and wool, that turned out to be Phil’s mum’s favourite shop, that was run by none other than Phil’s long-term family friends.

When they made it back to Phil’s house, Dan was still hoping things would suddenly get better. They were both nervous, of course, and so it was understandable there would be a few mishaps, a bit of awkwardness, but he was sure they could get over it.

But then he commented that Phil’s house looked a bit like the hotel in The Shining, and Phil just looked at him with a frown, as though he’d taken offence, and even though Dan scrambled to assure him he was just joking around, that he liked his house, honestly, Phil’s frown only deepened. They decided to order pizza and watch a film — they wouldn’t have to talk, and maybe they were both just nervous and after eating and relaxing things would improve.

The pizza came and the toppings had gotten mixed up and they had to pick bits off and they had extremely different opinions on the main character in the film and then Dan, so overwhelmed by how terribly everything was going, ended up choking on his pizza crust.

Phil had to give him the Heimlich Manoeuvre and Dan ended up coughing it all up on Phil’s hands.

They had realised, after only a night spent in person, that their months long friendship meant nothing outside of 140 character Tweets and cute comments on each other’s DailyBooths. It meant nothing outside of 5 hour Skype calls, where Dan could position himself at his best angle, and could quickly Google things Phil said if he didn’t understand or know what he was talking about, when they could both order their own pizzas and didn’t walk past knitting shops owned by family friends, because they were confined to bedrooms and cyberspace.

But Phil’s fans still wanted them to do a collaboration, and had been Tweeting about ‘Phil Is Not On Fire’ all day long, and Dan, who had paid an extortionate amount of money to be here, thought it would be a waste if they didn’t film after all.  
 So they set up the camera after dinner and halfway through the film (neither of them really wanted to watch the rest after such a disastrous evening) and sat down in front of it, fixing their hair and straightening their clothes, all in awkward silence.

Before pressing play, though, Phil turned to Dan. “Look, since we’re filming this after all, we should try and act as though… I don’t know, as though we’ve had fun today, and stuff? I don’t want to disappoint the viewers, and I know you don’t want to have wasted your money…” he trailed off, shrugging.

Dan could tell he was trying to be as polite as possible, because Phil was a good person and he wasn’t about to express his dislike obviously in front of Dan. He knew that even though their friendship was pretty much over (things could never go back to the way they were before) Phil most definitely didn’t want to hurt his feelings: Phil would never even hurt a fly.  
So Dan tried not to let the sting of his words affect him as he nodded mutely, and they both turned towards the camera.

Dan’s heart had been breaking more and more all day. He’d truly fallen in love with Phil, and realising that it just wasn’t going to happen in real life was the most horrible feeling he’d ever had. Because while Dan had been accidentally insulting Phil all day, and had been so awkward he’d fumbled over his words and actions, Phil had been exactly the same as he had been online, minus getting along with Dan. He was still just as in love with him as before, except now there was no chance of them getting together.

So they filmed Phil Is Not On Fire with Dan’s heart breaking in two and Phil making animal noises and jumping on Dan and Dan trying to smile instead of cry. When they watched it back, editing it together the next day (because Phil was a decent person and didn’t want to put up a video that Dan hadn’t liked or approved of) Dan felt hollow.

If Dan hadn’t experienced everything that he had yesterday, he would have watched the video and thought that nothing was amiss, that he and Phil were in fact best friends, that there was nothing odd between them. That there had been no chemistry at all and that they had both known, while filming, that their friendship was over.

They hadn’t even slept in the same room. Dan had slept in the spare room on the other side of the house, going to bed at 10pm because spending any more time together would have been too awkward — neither of them had anything more to say to each other.

Dan ended up leaving Manchester earlier than planned, the both of them admitting that they just weren’t compatible with each other outside of the Internet. But that was life, and there was nothing either of them could do about it other than force something to happen.

Of course, they’d keep in touch — they’d just filmed a collab together, and Dan and Phil were, to their fans, Dan and Phil. They couldn’t just cut contact: it would look bad for the both of them and both would likely lose viewers. And, although they wouldn’t say it, neither could let the other go just yet. The other reasons were just excuses, excuses, excuses.

Even though they had realised that there was nothing between them after all, both were holding onto hope, gripping it with their fingertips, stubbornly refusing to let go.


	2. and so it begins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this is the start of the fake dating? friendship?  
> Dan and Phil will have to decide themselves...

Dan sighed as he read through the comments on phil is not on fire, feeling the ache in his chest as he read about how he and Phil were ‘so cute together!’ and ‘totally meant to be!’. 

The video had gone down well — no one else had realised how off things had been other than he and Phil. He’d kind of hoped that other people would, simply so that Dan and Phil would never even consider collaborating again. If no one liked it, then why would they?

But everyone loved it, and everyone was asking when they were going to film another video together, and when Dan was going to visit Phil again, or was Phil going to travel to see Dan next time?

And Dan simply sat there, laptop burning his knees, his clock flashing that it was 4am from his bedside table. He pushed the laptop away when the heat got too painful to bear, and his eyes were refusing to focus on the comments, and dropped his head into his hands.

It would be so much easier if Dan wasn’t still in love with Phil, and wasn’t still harbouring hopes that maybe their first meeting didn’t go so well because of nerves. When he’d left Manchester, he was convinced that things were over forever and there was no chance of reconciliation.

But the longer he’d spent away from Phil, the more time he’d had to re-convince himself that actually there was a chance for them, that their first meeting was just awkward because they weren’t used to having each other there in person, and that if they were to meet up again then things might work out better.

However, he wasn’t sure what Phil was thinking, since they hadn’t spoken in the week that Dan had been at home. They hadn’t spoken for seven days. Ever since they’d started talking, they’d never gone for seven days without messaging each other, or texting, or tweeting, or commenting on each other’s things.

So it was understandable that Dan wasn’t sleeping, was spending a lot of his time curled up in bed playing Pokémon and feeling incredibly sorry for himself. It was also understandable that whenever his phone beeped or a notification popped up on his Facebook, or Youtube, or Twitter, or DailyBooth (which happened quite a lot, thanks to the sudden boost of subscribers from Phil) his heart leapt, wondering if it might be Phil.

It never was.

Until, at 4:03, he received a new DM from Phil on Twitter.

— Hey, Dan. My subscribers have been asking when you’ll be back on my channel. I don’t know what to tell them.

And then another. And another. And another.

— I don't want to tell them no and disappoint them, but I don't know what else to say. 

— I was thinking perhaps we could occasionally make videos together for their benefit?

— A strictly business arrangement thing, since they enjoy it and they're the reason I still do YouTube. What do you say?

Dan could barely breathe after reading the messages. Phil wanted them to make videos together, still, even though he clearly didn’t want to. It was evident from what he’d said that he was just considering this for the sake of his subscribers, which Dan wasn’t surprised about. Phil would do anything for them, including faking a friendship to keep them happy.

Which was kind of sweet, but also kind of dishonest, and Dan didn’t want to be dishonest with his viewers. But he also didn’t want to lose Phil, and if he had to choose between the two, it was Phil, no questions asked, awkwardness and the fact that they were no longer friends aside.

Still associating with Phil, especially in a business way and nothing more, would not help Dan get over him and move on at all, but he didn’t want to get over Phil and move on. Not at all. He wanted to fix things.

So he sent a message back:

— Okay, we can do that.

And then, with a burst of what he wanted to call confidence but was actually desperation, he sent another message straight away.

— But to convince them we’re actually friends, or boyfriends, or whatever they think we are, we’ll still have to interact publicly. 

— Like, tweet each other and like each other’s stuff and leave comments. 

Dan just hoped that Phil would go for this, because while it would be a good idea, it wasn’t exactly necessary. They could still claim friendship. Or whatever. Dan still wasn’t sure what they were going to be pretend to be. It was clear that the subscribers had thought Dan and Phil would become boyfriends, just like Dan himself had. 

Dan supposed they’d just find out, in the end. But before he could carry on down this line of thought, a new DM popped up onto his laptop screen from Phil.

— Sounds reasonable. Will text with details tomorrow, going to sleep now.

After reading the message, Dan couldn’t help the single tear that slid down his cheek. When was the last time Phil had told him goodnight without telling Dan he loved him and putting an extortionate amount of kisses at the end? 

All Dan could do, as he pushed his laptop aside and laid down atop his covers, not even bothering to clamber under them, was hope that things could only get better. After all, how could they get worse?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is the first chapter, I guess? Or the second? It's much less prose-y, as you can tell, but I'm excited about where I'm gonna take this. And feel free to give me suggestions on what you want to see, not everything is set in stone (aka I occasionally get stuck for ideas)... oops.


End file.
